Hard drive not accessable & asking to be formatted

[loki]

Hi,

I have had a user at work whos hard drive shows as raw / zero bytes.
The drive is shown in device manager & my computer but every time you
try to access it it asks to be formatted.
I have used r-studio & did open files & have recovered their precious
8Gb of pst files.


I am curious & want to learn what has caused this?
The OS is XP with NTFS. Im thinking along the lines that the partition
table/ MFT is corrupt & r-studio some how accesses the drive via the
MFT mirror? What do you think?
Can you use winhex to manually correct this? & if so how?


Thanks in advanced


Michael

[loki]

Have ran chkdsk e: & got the following:

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
73392 file records processed.
File verification completed.
146 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
2 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
54 percent complete. (73267 of 92542 index entries processed)
Error detected in index $SII for file 9.
Error detected in index $SII for file 9.
Error detected in index $SII for file 9.
92542 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.

Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode.

So I then ran chkdsk e: /f

H:\>chkdsk E: /f
The type of the file system is NTFS.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
73392 file records processed.
File verification completed.
146 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
2 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
54 percent complete. (73267 of 92542 index entries processed)
Correcting error in index $SII for file 9.
Correcting error in index $SII for file 9.
Correcting error in index $SII for file 9.
Sorting index $SII in file 9.
92542 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
Inserting an index entry with Id 10667 into index $SII of file 9.
Inserting an index entry with Id 10667 into index $SDH of file 9.
Repairing the security file record segment.
73392 file SDs/SIDs processed.
CHKDSK is compacting the security descriptor stream
9576 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
8910296 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

117218240 KB total disk space.
27725048 KB in 61608 files.
23728 KB in 9579 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
151972 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
89317492 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
29304560 total allocation units on disk.
22329373 allocation units available on disk.

All is now showing & the drive is accessable again

[drc]

For future reference, if the drive is not healthy (such as in the presence of bad sectors) checkdisk is a very bad idea

[loki]

Hi drc,
Thanks, Ive read that a lot & wouldnt use chkdsk normally but as I had already recovered their data they were happy & I was testing out ideas on the drive before we bin it. Any other ideas are always welcome?


Michael

[Alexii]

Logical bads on the MFT area? Windows can be so prissy sometimes =))

[dick]

You could now run Mhdd or Victoria on the drive using remap. This would probably re-allocate any bad sectors and also give you an idea whether the drive is worth re-using. You should also check the smart attributes to see if the drive is failing.